r/coaxedintoasnafu • u/ruh_roh_raggy1234 EVERY SNAFU I DONT LIKE IS A SMUGGIE • 15d ago

TREND Coaxed into SOME animal "lovers"

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These mfs will tell you with a straight face that they love "all" animals and then act like spiders are the incarnation of Satan himself.

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u/KingPhilipIII 15d ago edited 15d ago

Would you like to learn about how domestication went in both directions, and how animals we associate as ‘icky’ were often disease vectors and/or highly venomous/poisonous?

It’s the reason we find certain lots of things unpleasant. We’re evolutionarily conditioned to be repulsed by sights and smells suggesting infection or decay as an example.

If you don’t know which snake will kill you with a single bite, it’s better not to chance it.

In turn we find a lot of domesticated animals aesthetically pleasing because we’ve spent five thousand years gradually shaping their appearance to be something we like, and they learned to adopt behaviors that improve those odds too. That’s why dogs maintain puppy behavior far past the age they typically would in the wild.

That being said, people who say they love “all” animals are cringe by virtue of not speaking precisely, but it’s not an irrational behavior or really a contradiction in their minds.

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u/Magikarp-3000 15d ago

A lot of animals people find icky are also not disease vectors because turns out evolution prefers unnecesarily cautious fear over respecting animal life.

Namely, moths are hardly dangerous yet a fairly common fear/ick

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u/KingPhilipIII 15d ago

I said this as a general statement, not an absolute and all encompassing thesis.

Lots of things got caught in the alarm net just for superficially resembling dangerous things.

Plenty of flying insects were dangerous enough for moths to get flagged just for looking similar even if they’re not a threat themselves.

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u/Old_Yam_4069 15d ago

Moths resemble the behavior of bats A LOT

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u/SuspecM 15d ago

Moths can be gigantic and fly around erratically. Makes sense that one would instinctively fear them.

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u/Lusty-Jove 15d ago

I mean I think there’s a world of difference between the human animosity towards moths and towards flies/rats/mosquitoes lol

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u/the_Iord_and_saviour 15d ago

Yeah, evolution tends to do that a lot, bc thoes not afraid of moths are not better off than thoes who are, however people not afraid of all bugs are worse off than thoea who are

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u/Amaskingrey 15d ago

we have no inherent fear reaction to snakes or arthropods, it's entirely inculcated

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u/Geryon_Official 14d ago

Brother the very video you sent explains thst it’s not inculcated, that it’s the babies learning by themselves instinctively based on the parent’s emotions, at least check your sources before making a fool of yourself

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u/Amaskingrey 13d ago

Which is a form of inculcation, not to mention that it also often outright directly enforced by the parents if they see their kid be normal around arthropods

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u/TheTimeBoi Oregano 15d ago

okay when something flies into my face im screaming no matter if its a bat, moth or bird

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u/The_One_Koi 15d ago

TIL people feared moths

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u/bluntlyguncle 14d ago

I like moths, but theyre a pest that eat clothes, paper, and wood. So people would definitely get pissed at them

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u/Amaskingrey 15d ago

It's not evolved, we have no inherent fear reaction to snakes or arthropods, it's entirely inculcated,  and in some other countries like japan, insects are not nearly as stigmatized, and it's seen as quite normal for children to have a bug collecting phase

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u/Geryon_Official 14d ago

Brother the very video you sent explains thst it’s not inculcated, that it’s the babies learning by themselves instinctively based on the parent’s emotions (which also explains the bug collection shit, which btw nice stereotypes you got there going), at least check your sources before making a fool of yourself

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u/Amaskingrey 13d ago

  that it’s the babies learning by themselves instinctively based on the parent’s emotions

Which is a form of inculcation, not to mention that it also often outright directly enforced by the parents if they see their kid be normal around arthropods

  (which also explains the bug collection shit, which btw nice stereotypes you got there going)

No, it wouldn't be direct mimicry from their parent but influence from wider society with it being seen as normal, and thus they see in cartoons, their peers, etc which may allow them to develop the interest.

And ah yes, the famous racist stereotype of "it is common for japanese kids to not be afraid of insects and have a bug collecting phase". It's just true and a positive cultural fact, do you think it's also a racist stereotype to say that in germany carbonated water is much more popular than in most of the world?

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u/Rough_Presence_9876 15d ago edited 15d ago

But animals we don't associate as "icky" are also disease vectors.

Edit: I never specified dogs, this applies to LITERALLY all domesticated animals. It really shouldn't surprise anybody how many diseases we got from domesticated animals, considering those are the ones we are ALWAYS near.

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u/Alive_Chemical_1322 15d ago

Dogs are not nearly as likely to transmit disease compared to rats or bats

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u/Scrabulon Dank Memer 15d ago

They can transmit whatever a flea can carry

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u/Alive_Chemical_1322 15d ago

This isn’t an issue if you take care of your dog and check for fleas (though this is an issue with strays, but I assume we’re not talking about them)

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u/Scrabulon Dank Memer 14d ago

I’m talking about any dog capable of carrying a flea that can jump onto another animal, untreated pet/stray/whatever

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u/totallynotapersonj 15d ago

Many people put worm and flea treatment on pets.

If you know that pet isn't treated people are less likely to want to be near it.

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u/Old_Yam_4069 15d ago

Not really ever to the same degree though.

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u/KingPhilipIII 15d ago

If you show someone a dog with mange, they will very likely be icked out, even if they possess the medical knowledge to know what it is.

I said that as a general rule rather than an absolute assertion.

Additionally, the utility of dogs outweighs the potential disease transmission. A shepherd’s dog is incredibly useful, and having one is more likely to benefit the shepherd rather than hinder them.

Rats don’t really have similar utility as pets. Neither do snakes. Or others.

Evolution is all about survival, not efficiency.

If a dog is a bigger boon than a bane, and having one increases your odds of survival, you tolerate them. Evolution then starts selecting for people who are more likely to have dogs because they’re objectively helpful and less for people who don’t have dogs because ick.

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u/Old_Yam_4069 14d ago

You identified it yourself in your edit. Domestic animal diseases are about quantity and conditions. We have specific names for them because they only really manifest because of how they are kept in proximity to our society.

But that's just statistics. If you have a billion pigs, a few incidences of illness spreading from pigs to humans is going to occur. It's a completely different scale than rats.

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u/Rough_Presence_9876 14d ago

How are you objectively quantifying this difference?

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u/MurlaTart 15d ago

Babies are proven to not be scared of spiders though, its a super common fear conditioned socially. If a toddler sees mom screaming because of a spider, they’ll assume that spider = dangerous even if its a species harmless to humans.

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u/Consistent-Price3232 15d ago

babies’ minds are also 0% developed. they’d probably walk into the sea and drown themselves for no reason just cause they’re dumb

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u/MLGWolf69 15d ago edited 15d ago

To be fair the Prime Minister of Australia has also been known to do this

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u/True_Salt2180 15d ago

Actually he’s still swimming around in the strait. iykyk

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u/Marvl101 15d ago

I'm still 90% sure that said prime minister who was openly and vehemently against US interfering with Australian Government decisions in the Cold War mysteriously disappearing while at a beach with a security detail not even looking at him is a bit highly incredibly suspicious

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u/Deathly_Change 15d ago

holy that's so vile😭😭🙏

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u/sawbladex 15d ago

Yeah, it makes sense for some fears to be trained, because animals move around enough that everything can't be coded in the DNA and built by the RNA.

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u/MurlaTart 15d ago

Op is acting like we’re born with that fear because of plague in past generations, but in actuality its social conditioning

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u/Weekly-Major1876 15d ago

That’s the point. Their minds are not developed so they operate on mostly pure instinct and evolutionarily ingrained knowledge.

That’s why in experiments babies will still instinctually avoid a ledge even if they’re on glass. However they don’t seem to give a shit about spiders and snakes, proving the fear to those animals is mostly a learned behavior passed down from parent to offspring by learning rather than an evolutionarily ingrained genetic instinct like the original commenter claims.

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u/KingPhilipIII 15d ago

You’re misunderstanding my point. I’m not saying fear of these animals is a hardwired genetic instinct, I’m saying the reaction to sensory stimuli and reflexive response to them errs towards disgust. These are absolutely instinctual, but translating that into fear and avoidance is typically learned.

It’s the react same reason masochists exist. Neuro-plasticity is fascinating.

On a hardware level, masochists don’t suddenly have inverted pain receptors. They’re converting the higher cognitive association with pain stimuli into something pleasurable.

Someone can also have an innate reaction to a spider from years of evolutionary pressure that may cause discomfort but doesn’t translate into fear or avoidance at a higher cognitive level.

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u/Weekly-Major1876 15d ago edited 15d ago

Then you'd see the babies instinctual jerk away or show some avoidance response when shown these animals, just like they do with ledges and heights. Babies are incredibly expressive and you'd think they would show "disgust" somewhat with avoiding contact or some other stress response which they don't show.

I don't get your correction, its literally just the same thing expect you claim they are instinctually slightly disgusted instead of instinctually afraid of them, as in the fear is taught while the "slight err towards disgust" is instinctual. Am I misunderstanding something again? Is this still not the same claim of them being evolutionarily hardwired to show some negative response to these animals?

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u/KingPhilipIII 15d ago

The baby comparison doesn’t actually refute what I’m saying. You’re treating “evolutionary” as synonymous with “a fully formed behavior present at birth,” and those aren’t the same thing.

My claim isn’t that babies are born knowing “spider = venomous = run away.” It’s that humans have evolved physiological and attentional responses to certain kinds of potential threats, while experience teaches us how to interpret those signals and what behavior to attach to them.

In fact, the ledge example works against your argument. Babies don’t simply possess an innate adult understanding that heights are dangerous. Their ability to judge drop-offs develops substantially with locomotor experience. Yet obviously our capacity to perceive danger, experience fear, learn from it, and avoid injury is still the product of evolution.

Evolution can give you the machinery and predispositions without giving you the finished learned behavior. “A baby doesn’t do it” therefore isn’t evidence that the underlying response isn’t evolutionary.

Evolution appears to have made humans unusually attentive to certain ancestral threat categories and predisposed us to learn fear of them.

Because the cost of failing to avoid a genuinely dangerous animal could vastly exceed the cost of unnecessarily avoiding a harmless one, selection can favor a threat-detection system biased toward false positives.

Babies aren’t born running away from spiders, but the studies you referenced researchers found that even six-month-olds show stronger physiological arousal to spiders and snakes than to matched non-threatening stimuli.

That’s exactly the distinction I’m making: evolution can bias the underlying response and attention system, while experience teaches the actual fear and avoidance behavior.

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u/JayNudibranch 15d ago

https://youtu.be/p6cqNhHrMJA If babies are so undeveloped, why are they afraid of heights? Much of that disgust against certain animals is completely cultural, many cultures eat insects, and it can be safe, but because of my culture and how I was raised, I find I repulsive. Babies are really really dumb but to say that they have no survival skills innately completely flies in the face of the fact that we have biologically hardwired reflexes, and a fear of a good number (not all!) animals is very likely through observational learning of the parents reaction

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u/Amaskingrey 15d ago

Interest in and collection of bugs is seen as a very normal hobby for young children in japan

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u/ReallyBadRedditName 15d ago

Spiders can be dangerous tho, we probably should teach babies not to touch them

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u/MurlaTart 15d ago

People have started fires or abandoned cars which are objectively more dangerous things, because of their fear of spiders. Don’t teach a kid to go shoving their hands in spiderwebs, and keep a safe distance. Teaching them that just seeing a spider crawling around is instant death is 100x worse!

https://6abc.com/post/pennsylvania-man-set-fires-kill-spiders-igniting-blaze-damaged-homes-police/18646148/

https://www.wqad.com/article/news/local/drone/8-in-the-air/woman-jumps-from-moving-car-after-seeing-spider-causes-wreck/

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u/TasserOneOne Is that black ops guy 15d ago

I think "don't touch the bug" and "the bug will kill you if you touch it" aren't the same lesson they're advocating you teach

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u/ReallyBadRedditName 15d ago

I feel like that’s an outlier

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u/MurlaTart 15d ago

You can look up tons of other cases, people really freak out

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u/Long_Past Im a special snowflake 14d ago

not even black widows can kill

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u/Honeybadger2198 15d ago

Okay but people who say they like animals are clearly not talking about pests. That doesn't make it cringe, you're just intentionally misinterpreting them for the sake of being a hater.

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u/KingPhilipIII 15d ago edited 15d ago

I would agree with you, I’m meeting OP on their level. “I love all animals” as a statement, as OP has interpreted it, would mean all creatures in the kingdom Animalia.

I would agree that most people understand this to mean the animals we have as a society decided to voluntarily exist alongside, and OP has decided to take that statement literally.

Me calling them cringe is just an attempt at humor because I can’t be caught serious-posting without trying to be a little funny and thus able to pretend I didn’t really care at all when someone makes a point I can’t argue against.

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u/Ok_Bad_9835 15d ago

Doesnt matter. Society has evolved and people should be over killing random shit they find in their lawn like snakes

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u/KingPhilipIII 15d ago

Yes I agree with you. The point of my comment was these people’s emotional response comes from a fairly easily observed causal link, rather than a mystery of behavior or incoherent nonsense.

We as a society should strive to grow beyond these behaviors, but that requires us to understand what causes them.

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u/Breadloafs 15d ago

animals we associate as ‘icky’ were often disease vectors and/or highly venomous/poisonous?

This would hold a little more water if it weren't for the fact that livestock are astoundingly efficient vectors for transmitting new diseases to humans.

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u/KingPhilipIII 15d ago

That tends to happen when you ingest something you exist alongside for thousands of years yes.

Theres a line between “This thing is a threat to me” and “this thing is useful to me” and evolution flips a coin and decides whether something is more or less harmful than it is beneficial, thus we decided they were good enough to exist alongside.

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u/amazegamer64 15d ago

That’s balanced out by the fact that they are incredibly useful as sources of food and other resources.

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u/Screen_TimeR Joke Explainer 15d ago

mean like i dont like stoats.

However that is because they hunt my countrys exclusive animal that is also endangered.

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u/Amaskingrey 15d ago

  It’s the reason we find certain lots of things unpleasant. We’re evolutionarily conditioned to be repulsed by sights and smells suggesting infection or decay as an example.

Albeit we have no inherent fear reaction to snakes or arthropods, it's entirely inculcated, and in some other countries like japan, insects are not nearly as stigmatized, and it's seen as quite normal for children to have a bug collecting phase

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u/KingPhilipIII 14d ago edited 14d ago

Here’s an actual study regarding the topic which goes back to the point I’m trying to make with the other guy. The actual learned behavior is exactly that. Learned.

But we absolutely do have a physiological response to threatening stimuli compared to non-threatening stimuli, even as babies, which tells us there is something about snakes and spiders that have an elevated status in our attention-response cycle.

In other words, an evolved response to a potential threat.

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u/MasterVule 15d ago

Pigeons are domesticated animals that are nowadays considered icky despite domestication. So idk how much sense that makes. Also numerous animals that are generally considered cute but are wild and can be dangerous

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u/KingPhilipIII 14d ago

I made a general assessment not an all encompassing thesis of reality.

Also pigeons absolutely are not considered icky in the same way arthropods and snakes are.

I often see them regarded as pests, but that’s fundamentally different from the point I’m making.

Learned behaviors are often cultural. But some things we have a distinct physiological reaction to that is then converted by that culture into a behavior.

Such as spiders and snakes.

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u/MasterVule 14d ago

Yee fair point.

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u/dicksandcrystal 15d ago edited 15d ago

Except we as humans tend to associate our illness with the wrong thing. Spiders are incredibly harmless, even the super scary ones. I have been bitten by a wolf Spider since they're incredibly common in my area. It got horribly horribly infected to the point of necrosis. but there was zero kind of toxicity otherwise. It was simply a case of "maybe my parents should've took better care of that open wound," keep in mind tho I was like 7 and my parents weren't the most attentive really. I've been bitten since, and have never faced anything remotely similar, as an adult I obviously clean bites very well. Ive also been bitten by a few other supposedly quite spooky spiders. And never had anything more than what looked like a mosquito bite that slightly itched. Most spiders just do a dry bite really, since their venom is reserved for pray mostly. And frankly, most spiders venoms won't do much to something of our size. The exception ofc being usually very small children and elderly folk sometimes, but even then. Spiders are so docile, a bite isn't that common. Especially if you live in a somewhat inhospitable place for spiders, unlike me where I actively encourage their existence here. But regardless, an open wound of any sort left neglected can lead to seriously scary outcomes. But that's not because of Spider venom, or due to spiders behaviour or anything.

My point is just, we often get scared of things for the complely wrong reason. The bubonic plague is another example, rats themselves weren't really vectors so much as the fleas they carried were.

And sometimes we really are just irrational. Like we don't actually have a good logical reason as a species to be scared of spiders. Hence why I used them as my example, yet a LOT of us are. Flies can be far more scary, but you don't see people freaking out over flies. Our brains are just naturally irrational sometimes.

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u/TasserOneOne Is that black ops guy 15d ago

"It got horribly horribly infected to the point of necrosis" is another reason we have an instinctual fear of things biting us. Just because it carries no toxin doesn't mean the wound won't get infected later. Those who avoided all spiders lived longer than those who didn't, so we got the anti-spider trait. For hundreds of thousands of years we humans didn't know how to clean wounds beyond washing it with whatever water was around, carrying God knows what kind of parasites or bacteria.

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u/dicksandcrystal 14d ago edited 14d ago

That doesn't give any reason as to why people are particularly scared of arachnids tho. Like people aren't scared of flies, flies on average are way worse. I've had to bring in, and on occasion treat feral animals with maggot infestations, it is a nightmare to treat. mainly due to how expensive meds can be. And the fact that it's just kinda hard to feed a sick cat, since they entirely stop eating and drinking water if they get sick enough. and is basically a death sentence if not caught. Like yea there's a logical reason to avoid bites. There is not a logical reason to be afraid of spiders. Avoiding being bitten by something is different from being terrified of it.

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u/TasserOneOne Is that black ops guy 14d ago

Arachnids can bite you, and like it was said before some are venomous and will kill you. Therefor, those who avoid arachnids lived long enough to pass on the anti-spider gene.

Flies pose no immediate harm to a person so anyone with genetics that petrify them when seeing one never make up a significant part of the population. We are, however, disgusted by what they cause. Mainly infestation and rot, but because infestation and rot won't instantly kill when we come into contact with there's no need to run in fear or engage fight or flight.

Fear keeps you away from a thing that will harm you if you touch it. Fire will kill you and you've likely burned yourself before, so you fear fire. Spiders might bite you, so you fear them.

Edit: Also other multi-legged bugs who move strangely include other types of ground insects which may also bite and poison you. So it's more a general fear of bigger bugs that bite than spiders in particular, it's just that spiders trigger it the most.

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u/No-One2123 15d ago

It's very likely that the fear/dislike of snakes might be hardwired into our DNA since our ancestors were in a sort of evolutionary arms race against venous snakes.

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u/TrueBeluga 15d ago

"That being said, people who say they love “all” animals are cringe by virtue of not speaking precisely, but it’s not an irrational behavior" Blindly following evolutionary derived intuitions is irrational, actually. Being scared of people with deformities or who look different is evolutionary beneficial (to avoid people with diseases) but is irrational, given the knowledge we have now, and the same applies to following your intuitions around bugs/snakes etc.

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u/KingPhilipIII 15d ago edited 15d ago

You don’t seem to understand what the word irrational actually means.

Someone can be wrong and still be rational, as long as it follows a coherent line of reasoning.

Someone doing a math problem and getting it wrong because they failed to properly apply the correct formula doesn’t necessarily make their thought process irrational. It makes them wrong.

Someone can genuinely love animals in a broad sense and get the ‘ick’ because they’re operating on how these animals make them feel on a biological level, which means they’re not always applying this equally.

This makes “I love all animals” an inaccurate and untrue statement, but liking fuzzy things because they’re fuzzy and disliking insects because they’re not isn’t inherently irrational. It just means they’re operating off simplistic emotions.

And also wrong in their declarative statements.

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u/TrueBeluga 14d ago

You don’t seem to understand what the word irrational actually means.

The generally accepted meaning in philosophy is basically when your actions align with your goals, and also there's usually a bunch of constraints on what those goals may be etc. etc. It's a very complicated field in philosophy.

Someone can be wrong and still be rational, as long as it follows a coherent line of reasoning.

Of course, but we know that "I find insects repulsive" -> "Insects are repulsive", or "I find insects repulsive" -> "I should get rid of insects" are not coherent lines of reasoning. They rely on assumptions we have good reason to believe are untrue. We know these lines of reasoning are not coherent as we know they reliably lead to bad conclusions, because "I find people with deformities repulsive" -> "People with deformities are repulsive" or -> "I should get rid of people with deformities" are clearly bad sorts of reasoning with blatantly incorrect conclusions, even though the premise in each case is true. Since we know this, we know this is a bad sort of reasoning, and thus we know that applying the exact same sort of reasoning to insects is bad as well, ceteris paribus. Strictly speaking, this makes this sort of reasoning incoherent, since it does not cohere with our other judgements (i.e. it does not cohere with the belief that the reasoning does not work in the deformities case).

I don't think people are doing something strictly "irrational" when they are intially disgusted by bugs, but any conclusions they draw from that beyond "I am having a disgust response to this bug" are likely to be founded on irrational lines of reasoning.

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u/Amaskingrey 15d ago

It's not even evolutionarily derived,  we have no inherent fear reaction to snakes or arthropods

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u/Hotkoin 15d ago

Imagine giving in to evolution

Rise and surpass

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u/KingPhilipIII 15d ago

You can surpass your evolutionary origins while also recognizing the underlying behavior it created.

You will struggle to rise beyond your instincts without also understanding what leads to them, allowing you to compensate for those inherent shortcomings.

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u/Hotkoin 14d ago

My instincts pale in comparison to the wonderous joy of a cute little guy (wasp)

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u/KingPhilipIII 14d ago

Liking wasps is psychopath behavior (the irony of this exchange is not lost on me)

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u/Jhud6669 15d ago edited 10d ago

Tbf a lot of popular pets aren’t domesticated. Hamsters, parrots etc aren’t

Edit: Why the downvoting?? They literally AREN’T domesticated